This is my repository of some of the articles and academic papers I have written since 2007 on just about any topic under the sun. They are mostly SEO and product review articles, blog posts, commentaries, research term papers and dissertations. Feel free to use them for your purposes.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

The interviews conducted on a
face-to-face session were captured on a mobile phone recorder and transcribed
verbatim with some corrections in grammar and vocabulary. There were common insights which were
summarized and grouped into themes, and presented in the table below. Only the
salient common responses are summaries and presented.

1.What
do you think are the most important qualities of a project manager in a
multicultural project management setting? And why?

Interviewee: 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9

Team
management skills are the most important.
The PM has the duty to steer the team towards delivering expected
outcomes, like a sports team manager, only the demand is greater since you
have several nationalities involved. As a PM, the overriding requirement is
to lead a ragtag team in fulfilling expected deliverables. A people-centric attitude that values the insights
of team members is another quality since how you communicate will depend on
this attitude. We're talking about
implementing a project by people, not machines. Motivating them towards a common objective
is knowing their interests and dispositions and harnessing these towards a
common purposive action can make a big difference in the success of a project.
Integral to this is the ability of the PM to understand non-verbal
communication among other nationalities as they often go beyond what is
spoken or the literal meaning of word

The ability to foster teamwork
through a people-centered appreciation of one’s team members is the common
theme among interviewees in this question. This is one quality that involves
communication skills to enable the PM to understand the dynamics behind team
development so that a common understanding about what is important in a
project can be achieved. The skill is not limited to communicating in a
language that everyone in the team understands such as English, but is also
about understanding the social implications of non-verbal language cues that
transcend structural limits of language.

Interviewee: 2, 5, and 7

Communication
skills are the most important. Information is the lifeblood of any organised
effort working to achieve a common object.
Information dissemination through sufficient communication skills
makes the PM a facilitator and a conduit to achieve and maintain smooth
information flow that is important in any project management effort.

Communication and information go together as the smooth flow of information being sent,
processed and received by a person is what communication is all about. This flow becomes even more difficult to
maintain in a team made up of various nationals speaking in various tongues
but have to understand each other as they work together. Information is circulated and generated in
project activities, from objectives, plans, issues, risks, problems,
deliverable expectations, timeline, failures, and project status, a good PM
should be able to communicate the relevant information to all team members as
applicable.

2 With team members from various countries, do
you think a second language is a prerequisite to get the project working
smoothly? And Why?

Interviewee: 1, 3, 5, 8 and 9

In today's globalized industries where we operate, it can't be
helped that English becomes part of the communication skills of our
management staff that have to deal with our foreign principals and
counterparts in many of our construction projects. We deal with workers from a few countries
most of which have already a working knowledge of English. We also coordinate
with several suppliers in Europe and America and English is an international
language.

Interviewee: 2, 4, and 7

A second
language is a must. Depending on the
project’s team composition, this can be English. French or Spanish. We have a
project management staff trained in these languages and are deployed
accordingly.

Except for one interviewee whose company
prefers to use interpreters in their projects, all interviewees share the
same sentiment that a second language is necessary in conducting their
project management efforts. They recognize English as an international
language and even require it among their management team whose key members
are also trained in ESL. Others not
only have PMs trained in ESL but also French and other languages as required
in their projects.

3 What problems do
you generally encounter when managing multicultural workforces in a
project? And what solutions should be in
place to address or prevent them from occurring?

Interviewee: 1 and 8

Enabling
the team to gel as one towards a common objective takes care of 90% of the
work needed to succeed in project management.
To this end, we embark on team building exercises which, depending on
the hierarchies of a project team, can take up to a month prior to actual
project work.

Again the issue of teamwork emerges
but this time, the solution is about embarking on team-building where issues
and potential conflicts can be identified and addressed right at the start of
any project engagement. Such sessions
are communication-intensive and often conducted by a 3rd party
resource that is trained in developing human capital in an organization to
work as team.

Interviewee: 2, 5, and 9

A second language is great but one has to
distinguish between the ability to speak and understand the language for
everyday causal use and the ability to digest complex technical
documents. This is often the problem
we encounter and it often takes a few meetings to explain verbally in more
casual linguistic style what a document contains and how its details relate
to the project.

Interviewee 4

Misunderstanding occurs when the PM fails to
listen attentively to questions and issues raised by foreign team members,
especially in matters of complex technical natures.

This reflects the
various levels of communicative competence that starts with conversational
skill and progresses to the ability to read complex content in a
language. The two go together can the ability to read
complex technical documents is a must for multicultural projects that are
have high technology content.

Depending on the project, I have to say that
some nationals are more problematic than others. In addition, it also depends
in what functions they are assigned. Those in management and consultancy
positions offer little problems but those in the contractual labor groups
have the most, especially among cantankerous Indian nationals who can't seem
to get along with other nationals.
Filipinos as great and they offer the least problems. The solution we adopted is to limit ethnic
involved to Chinese, Filipinos and Pakistanis who, based on experience, have
given us the least headache.

This problem may be
subjectively perceived and the solution adopted can be seen as biased against
certain nationalities or ethnic groups.
But one cannot argue over experience when the post-project assessments
point to observed empirical difficulties in multicultural projects as being
caused repeatedly by certain nationals more than others in a project team.
The solution adopted has been to choose the set of overseas contractuals and
expatriates that have presented that least problems to the project team.
Hence, a level of culture favorites have emerged with prejudices against
certain nationals.

4. In
your opinion, do you think there is a need to improve the communication skills
of project managers in the country to meet the challenge of Vision 2021? If so, in what areas?

Interviewee: 1, 6 and 8

Projects
share similarities that allow some degree of predictability and we don’t need
to add to the uncertainties by not structuring and formalizing the
communication process so that cultural awareness and teamwork are in place
right from the start. Misunderstandings are normal but if we train our PMs to
be acute aware of cultural nuances within a procedural framework, projects
can sail through the communication barriers emerging from cultural diversity.
That’s what we do to give us confidence in meeting Vision 2021.

The issue of fostering cultural
awareness and teamwork surface again but the concept here is to overcome the
challenge through a structured and formal approach to communication which can be done through procedural methods
such as regular meetings, teambuilding sessions and form-based
reporting.

Interviewee: 2, 3, 4, 7, and 9

The ability to communicate goes beyond
casual oracy and into comprehending complex technical documents and writing
detailed reports that can be understood by target stakeholders. It is important that we train our people in
the technical aspects of writing and comprehension skills to complete their
second language literacy they have acquired from university education. Either
that or we get consultants and interpreters who can do the work for us.

Reading and writing
skills that go beyond oracy is one area that need improvement and project
managers who are new in the field can benefit from in-house training to
further hone the 2nd language skills. The alternative to use 3rd party
interpreters and consultants is always there and may be used to augment the
translation or writing of reports depending on the exigencies of the project.

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About Me

Semi-retired since 2009 and now working as a freelance photo editor/colorist and online writer. Started out as an avionics mechanic at Philippine Airlines, transferred to its Marketing and IT departments before becoming the MIS head for Citadel Holdings. Then went on to become BPO Mobilization Manager at Accenture and finally Business Development Director at an Ads agency.